A Company in 500 words 11 to 20

Wonder Stocks is dedicated to identifying truly outstanding investment opportunities, which are rare and require extensive research to uncover. Our “A Company in 500” series reflects this effort, evaluating numerous businesses to find those with exceptional potential. Most companies, while often well-run, don’t meet our high standards for transformative returns.

The below provides a short summary of ten companies.

These 10 summaries included two basic materials companies, a yawn-inducing IT services business, a played-out roll out story, a family-controlled flooring company, a big-data titan, a broker, an interesting asset manager, a potentially interesting medical data business and large ground works engineer

Companies Not Worth Further Review:

• Breedon: A well-managed quarry company based in Derbyshire. Good but not great.

• Redcentric: A little tech-support business. It operates in a tricky area with high competition and little growth.

• Domino’s Pizza Group: The owner of the master franchise agreement in the for Domino’s Pizza. It used to be small and growing but these days there is little growth to had. Yesterday’s news.

• BHP Group: One of the world’s largest mining companies. Better than a lot of people think and good money can/could be made trading at the right time. Ultaimtely, not the type of company we’re looking for.

• James Halstead: A decent sleep-at-night type business with a super balance sheet and well-aligned management but it will struggle to find meaningful growth from here.

• Experian: The largest credit bureau in the world. Excellent business with dependable, albeit slow, growth. Really it is an American company and usually has a valuation to match. Good but not wonderful.

• TP ICAP Group: A broking business with offices all ofver the world. Once were at the forefront of innovation and made handsome returns as a result but the glory days are now past.

• Impax Asset Management: Green asset manager. Had a tremendous period when green investing was new and it was the only show in town. These days, everyone does green products and Impax’s niche has disappeared. At time of writing it looks very cheap but it’s not interesting enough.

• Van Elle Holdings: One of the largest groundworks engineers in the world. Whilst what it does is technical and difficult, there is surprising high competition, which keeps the returns low.

Stocks worth a little more work but probably aren’t interesting

• Diaceutics: Interesting business that makes dealing with diagnostic data easier. In the emerging world of personalised medicine it might prove interesting but much more work needs to be done to determine the extent of the opportunity set.

Summary: Of these ten companies reviewed, nine don’t meet Wonder Stocks’ rigorous criteria for further investigation, while one shows very modest potential but need more scrutiny. Our high standards mean few businesses will stand out, but the search for exceptional investments continues.

Wonder Stocks creates three 500 or less word summaries of companies per week. These exist to create a filter to find companies that are truly exceptional. A library of all stocks covered can be found here - these are and will always be free to read. The very best ones are covered in greater detail on our Deep Dives where we go into detail about why these companies have the potential to generate truly Wonderful returns. The first six Deep Dives are free, but accessing new investment insights requires a subscription upgrade.

Click here to see summaries of the previous ten companies.